truction?"

"Please your Highness, I did."

"You and another?"

"Well, sir, there was another: but he's gone--no use in trying to find
him, he's away. If," added the young man, with his usual recklessness,
"there should be punishment for destroying a wasp's nest, your Highness
shall see that I will bear it as well as----"

The Protector again interrupted the youth's eloquence by adding, "As
well as you did the hanging over yonder bay? No, no--we can
discriminate, by God's blessing, between the young of the plundering fox
and the cub of a lion: both are destructive, but the one is mean and
cowardly: the other--it shall be our care to train the other to nobler
purposes."

Springall raised his eyes, almost for the first time, from the ground,
and started at seeing his friends standing on a level with the
Protector. Robin's cheek was blanched, and his ken wandered over the
blazing gulf which had swallowed up the dwelling of his early years.

Springall, with the quickness of feeling that passes from kind heart to
kind heart, without the aid of words, sprang towards him, and catching
his arm, exclaimed,

"Your mother's body! it is safe, safe, Robin, under the dark tree, by
the cairn stones. Surely I would not let it be so destroyed."

Cromwell's veneration for his own mother was one of the most beautiful
traits in his character; from that instant the Protector of England
took the boy Springall unto his heart: there was something in common
between them--out of such slight events are destinies moulded.

"Your Highness," said Walter, whom we must now distinguish as WALTER
CECIL, "will pardon one who is indebted to you, not only for a restored
fortune, but for his hopes of happiness. Your Highness will, I trust,
pardon me for so soon becoming a suitor:--that boy----"

"Shall be cared for--it pleased the Almighty that Major Wellmore
encountered more than one brave heart and trusty hand in this same Isle
of Shepey. After a time we trust to show you and your cousin-bride, when
she visits her god-mother, how highly we esteem your friendship; and we
trust, moreover, that the awful lesson of retributive justice, it has
graciously pleased the Lord to write in palpable letters of fire, will
be remembered by all those who hear of Hugh Dalton and the Fire-fly.
Great as is the power given into our keeping, we would not have dared to
execute such awful judgment as that which has fallen upon the man of
many sins. And behold, also,